We asked experts from a broad range of industries to open up to us about things they know about their industry but that we probably don’t and we’ve shared some of those responses below.

Gretchen Butler | Theatre Administrator

I’ve been thinking about this a lot during the pandemic, and I think that lots of people are unaware of how hard theatre artists work to make a show happen. The entire goal of our art form is to transport you into a story, and when we do that well it does (and should) appear effortless. Most audience members will never know that each moment in the play was discussed by a team of people. What does the character mean when she says this? What does it indicate if one character walks away from someone else in this moment? What does the type of hat a character is wearing say about her? Each and every moment is discussed in production meetings and rehearsals to ensure that, when the audience walks in, everything lines up perfectly to pull them into the story. It takes hours of work and dedication to make something look easy! Read more>>

Pamela Holley | Serial Enterprenuer & Marketing Consultant

Marketing is not for the purpose of sales and the goal of your marketing efforts is to create value not sales and pretty content for instagram. Marketing is actually more of a science experiment that you constantly set a theory, run trials, collect results, and optimize or change theory. Most people go into hiring someone for marketing with the idea to increase sales when they need to be hiring a sales team. Read more>>

Lizette Cobbs | Creative Director & Visual Brand Design Strategist

The thing that people outside of my industry are probably unaware of is that branding is an intentional, continuous process that digs way deeper than just designing a nice logo and beautiful website. And there is no one size fits all approach to it. As a graphic designer, I naturally gravitated toward the branding and marketing industries, more so branding. This was because I began to see an influx of business owners who were ready to move forward with bringing their business to fruition but didn’t know how to. They would come to me ready to create a logo and/or website, ready to check that off their to do list. But one thing I realized as I grew was that although my clients were ready for the success they thought came from having a logo and a website, they weren’t aware of nor were they ready for the process that came after. Read more>>

Kat Ash | Illustrator

In illustration as well as design oriented projects, the one thing about this industry outsiders are probably unaware of is the research behind the scenes. As an outsider, it’s easy to think a beautiful image produced just “happens”. Sometimes that can be the case when it’s my own personal work, but we are trained to understand that going with our very first idea with a client and project is not the best. We are taught to challenge and expand our minds by producing multiple ideas. I do take it as a compliment, however, that people would believe it all comes out of me right when I begin drawing, ha! So, the downside, through my own freelancing experience, is the research being very much a part of the process regarding the invoicing aspect. I learned a very tedious process from my professors in grad school that I still follow to this day. Read more>>

Neelima Biddix | Naturopathic Doctor and Biofeedback Practitioner

Biofeedback Therapy called Biofeedback training is a process that our bodies perform on a regular basis because the body is constantly taking care of itself.The theory is that undue stress disrupts the inherent electromagnetic frequencies at which the body’s cells,organs,brain waves etc resonate and that by returning these frequencies back to their natural state,the stress and any subsequent illness that occured because of the disruption can be corrected.We have extreme stress in today’s world and the body is not able to cope in dealing with it and starts breaking down resulting in sickness and disease.Studies have shown that people who are over stressed produce different patterns of brain waives than people who are not not over-stressed and that reversal of that stress,in particular through techniques such as Biofeedback training can help an individual can bring back those brain waves back to normal. Read more>>

Cameron Jeffrey | Illustrator, Muralist, Writer & Comic Artist

Success in a creative field, as I’ve found, usually has less to do with skill and more to do with a combination of luck and a decent to significant financial launching pad. There are a lot of fairly arbitrary barriers into the art industry as a whole meant to keep people who weren’t born into a certain area of the class structure out if they’re not exceptionally good and/or happen to also be very socially connected. It’s a hard lesson to learn when you start out given the general assumption is that good art will rise to the top, but in my experiences and observations, that is not the most common case. Luckily, things like social media and community based art initiatives/spaces are working to erode those barriers in some ways, but they can only shoulder so much of that burden. Read more>>